“Just Doing Nothing Is Difficult”: Even By ‘Do-Nothing’ Standards, This Congress Is Useless
On Friday, the House of Representatives will join the Senate on recess, leaving the 113th Congress on pace to be one of the most ineffective in history.
Its reputation for inaction is well earned. As the Pew Research Center’s Drew DeSilver points out, as of Wednesday this Congress has passed just 142 laws — fewer than any of its recent predecessors did in their first 19 months.
And Congress isn’t just failing to act on major iniatives, like gun, immigration, or tax reform. It’s also passed fewer ceremonial bills — think post office renamings, or commemorative coin authorizations — than any of its predecessors in the past 16 years.
As House Republicans demonstrated this week, even doing nothing has become exceedingly difficult for this group. Republican leaders were forced to pull their immigration bill from the floor without a vote on Thursday, after failing to collect enough votes for it from within their own caucus. This, despite the fact that the bill has no chance of ever becoming law, and is — by House Republicans’ own admission — substantively useless.
After allowing the most right-wing Republicans to order from a menu of changes, it appears that the House will be able to pass its message bill on Friday. But as long as the Republican majority is filled with “a lot of members who just don’t want to vote for anything,” as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) put it, Congress will continue to struggle to pass many actual laws.
By: Henry Decker, the National Memo, August 1, 2014
“Don’t Be Fooled, The GOP Wants Impeachment”: A Litmus Test To Separate Constitutional Conservatives From RINO’s
In Washington, the conversation about impeachment is preceded by a conversation about a conversation about impeachment.
Democrats say Republicans are bring up the I-word to lay the groundwork for impeachment proceedings for high crimes and misdemeanors after the November elections; Republicans say this is nonsense—it is Democrats who are fanning these Clintonian flames in order to paint the GOP as out of touch and energize their base. “A scam,” House Speaker John Boehner called it. A ploy, Karl Rove labeled impeachment talk in his Wall Street Journal column, by a cynical president trying to distract from his failed agenda.
Rove and the Republicans do have a point. Congressional Democrats have used any chatter about impeaching President Obama as their own personal cash register, sending out a slew of fundraising emails warning of an imminent trial. Conservatives have noted a recent study that found that MSNBC mentioned impeachment 448 times in July—that’s once every 22 minutes—while the subject came up just 95 times on Fox News during the same time period.
But travel outside the Beltway, and the conversation about impeachment is far from abstract. In fact, in the remaining Republican primaries across the country, the issue is front-and-center, with GOP candidates signaling that they are more likely than their opponents to remove Obama from the Oval Office.
“I would certainly vote for impeachment,” said Joshua Joel Tucker, a computer systems analyst running for Congress in southeast Kansas against incumbent U.S. Rep. Lynn Jenkins in the August 5 primary. “If you look up the grounds for impeachment in the Constitution, one of them is malfeasance, which is basically not doing the job you are supposed to do. And I don’t think anybody could say that Obama is doing the job he is supposed to do.”
In the neighboring 4th District, incumbent Mike Pompeo and former Rep. Todd Tiahrt are locked in a fierce battle in which, according to one local newspaper, the need to impeach the president seems to be the only thing they can agree on.
At a recent forum, Pompeo said that the president had engaged in “absolute overreach.” “If such a bill were introduced, I would [vote to impeach]” he said, while Tiahrt said that Obama had broken the law” and proudly noted his votes during his previous turn in Congress to impeach President Bill Clinton.
And in the race for a U.S. Senate seat there, a spokesman for Milton Wolf, the Tea Party-backed doctor challenging longtime lawmaker Pat Roberts, refused to rule out the prospect of impeachment, saying that it would depend on which specific articles passed the House.
“If it is determined that the president violated his oath of office, that would certainly justify impeachment proceedings,” the spokesman said.
But it is not just in deep-red states like Kansas where impeachment talk is a campaign topic. Candidates up and down blue state Michigan have brought it up, and it has become something of a litmus test to separate “constitutional conservatives” from “RINO,” according to Matthew Shepard, a Tea Party leader from the central part of the state.
“True conservatives are mentioning it. And if Congress had any gumption they would have taken care of this by now.”
Indeed, Michigan’s 7th District, in the southern part of the state, is represented by Tim Walberg, who has been calling for Obama’s impeachment since back in 2010, when he said that such a move could force the president to release his birth certificate. His opponent in the August 5 primary, Tea Party-backed Douglas Radcliffe North, floated impeachment in his video announcing his candidacy.
Also in the Wolverine State, Kerry Bentivolio, a first-term congressman and former reindeer farmer, told a gathering of Republicans last year that it would “be a dream come true” to impeach Obama. Alan Arcand, a garage owner in the Upper Peninsula who is challenging incumbent Congressman Dan Benishek, told the The Daily Beast that Congress should hold off on impeaching the president for now—until Attorney General Eric Holder is impeached first.
“The way I see it, if we can’t hold Eric Holder accountable, how are we going to hold Barack Obama accountable?” he said. “This Congress should be held accountable. They are letting these people do whatever they want.”
The impeachment issue is driving campaign narratives even in the relatively liberal precincts of New England. In a race to take on Democratic incumbent Ann Kuster, both Republicans have said that Congress should explore whether or not to impeach Obama, with front-runner Marilinda Garcia telling a town hall meeting just this week that the president ignored “the separation of powers, through executive actions, executive privileges,” and that he was “completely in violation of his constitutional rights and obligations.”
“If it’s an impeachable offense as the process will show, then every member of Congress is also sworn to uphold that and needs to vote appropriately,” Garcia added.
This is not to suggest that should any of these candidates win, that Obama is in danger of impeachment. Republicans are aware of what happened in 1998, when they pushed to impeach Clinton over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, a move that backfired on them and led to lesser-than-expected Democratic losses at the ballot box.
And besides, as Arcand, one of the few interviewed for this story to urge caution, put it, “If we do that, then it will just mean we got Joe Biden as president.”
By: David Freedlander, The Daily Beast, August 1, 2014
“The Not-So-Secret GOP Strategy For Everything”: Do Nothing, And Blame Obama
You almost have to feel sorry for House Speaker John Boehner. He’s taken on the task of crafting a punitive, stingy, self-contradictory GOP version of a bill to deal with the border crisis that most of his party wants to blame solely on President Obama. There’s no reward for that.
His apparent leadership rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, has been whipping Boehner’s members to oppose Boehner’s bill. As part of an attempted compromise, the speaker is going to let his members vote to end the president’s deferred action on deportations, even though they have no power to do that. But he wants to keep that issue separate from the border-crisis bill, and Cruz, the shadow speaker, is telling members to say no.
In the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol sides with Speaker Cruz. Passing Boehner’s bill, he says, will interfere with the GOP’s top priority – running up big election wins in November. The only reasonable GOP response to the border crisis is to do nothing – and blame Obama.
Now, it’s been obvious since early 2009 that this is the GOP agenda. Rarely, however, does any Republican lay bare the craven political logic behind the party’s anti-Obama obstructionism. But wrong-way Bill Kristol is no average guy. His inbred arrogance lets him treat thuggish political sabotage as political genius. He seems to think he’ll get his point across to House backbenchers if he speaks very slowly and enunciates.
Here’s how he spells it out:
If the GOP does nothing, and if Republicans explain that there’s no point acting due to the recalcitrance of the president to deal with the policies that are causing the crisis, the focus will be on the president. Republican incumbents won’t have problematic legislation to defend or questions to answer about what further compromises they’ll make. Republican challengers won’t have to defend or attack GOP legislation. Instead, the focus can be on the president.
Get it? If they listen to Kristol, Republicans won’t have to do any of the heavy lifting associated with governing. Just vote with Speaker Ted Cruz, get back on the campaign trail to bash Obama, and all will be well.
While he’s at it, Kristol also backs up the Obama administration’s claim that the House GOP plan could make things worse at the border. Both sides seem to agree that Boehner’s bill is a mess. But that’s not the reason to kill it, Kristol argues. The reason to kill it is entirely political.
Boehner’s team seems to think that by passing a bad bill that will never become law anyway, Republicans will nonetheless get credit for trying to deal with the border mess, rather than just point fingers at the president. Kristol thinks Boehner has that entirely backward: No one who matters – meaning, nobody in the GOP base that’s so crucial to 2014 midterm success – is going to care that Boehner tried to solve the problem. That’s just distracting. The entire point is to blame Obama — while giving him absolutely no help in making things better.
Oh, and to my false-equivalence-loving, “both sides do it” friends in the media: Bill Kristol sees you, and he’s not fooled. Republicans might get credit from the media for tackling the issue “perhaps for one day,” but it “will take the focus off the man who is above all responsible for the disaster at the border — the president.” On the other hand, if Republicans kill the bill, Kristol knows he can count on leading pundits to go back to asking their most urgent question: Why can’t Obama lead?
Kristol’s strategy is not just politically craven, it’s cruel to the children and families at the border. But Republicans can’t be expected to care about them. And yet, if you believe the new immigrants are vectors of crime and disease, as many conservatives do, inaction is also cruel to the good red-state voters of Arizona and Texas who are bearing the brunt of the influx. You might want to help those red states protect themselves, by passing some funding and some legislative relief to reduce the logjam at the border, and send those who don’t deserve asylum home more quickly.
Nah.
Any kind of legislative solution — even a sham one like Boehner’s — would accept the premise that the border crisis is a complicated bipartisan creation, the result of years of drug, immigration and national security policies that worsened the poverty and political corruption driving Central Americans to flee their homes or send their children north. Any kind of solution also commits the GOP to being a partner in governing, and they’ve given up on that, in the age of Obama and perhaps permanently.
Better to do nothing and blame Obama, and count on the media to fall for it – again. Kristol has been proven wrong about virtually everything else in his career, but he’s been right about the media, so his corrupt strategy may just work.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, July 31, 2014
“No One To Blame But Themselves”: The GOP’s Impeachment Dilemma Will Only Get Worse
Today John Boehner declared that any talk of Republicans impeaching President Obama is a sinister plot originating in the White House, from which so many other sinister plots have come. “It’s all a scam started by Democrats at the White House,” he said. “This whole talk about impeachment is coming from the president’s own staff and coming from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Why? Because they’re trying to rally their own people to give money and show up in this year’s elections.” Which is partially true. Democrats do want to talk about impeachment, and it does help them raise money (though while an actual impeachment would certainly get Democratic voters to the polls in November, it’s much less likely that just talking about it will do so). But that’s only part of the story.
Boehner and other Republican leaders are now trying to walk an impossible tightrope. On one hand, they’re arguing that they have no interest in impeaching the president — they know that it would be a political catastrophe if they did — and any suggestion to the contrary is nothing but Democratic calumny. On the other hand, they’re arguing that Obama is a lawless tyrant who is trampling on the Constitution. If that contradiction has put them in a difficult situation, they have no one to blame but themselves.
Like so many of their problems, this one has its roots in the uncontrollable Tea Party beast that they nurtured but can’t control. It’s true that the only prominent Republicans explicitly calling for impeachment are ones like Michele Bachmann, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), or Sarah Palin. But you can see the quandary in people like Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was on Fox News Sunday this week, and when Chris Wallace tried to pin him down to say that Republicans wouldn’t impeachment Obama, Scalise wouldn’t do it.
It’s probably because Scalise knows that impeachment isn’t supported just by his party’s fringe. According to a YouGov poll taken earlier this month, 89 percent of Republicans think “Barack Obama has exceeded the limits of authority granted a President by the US Constitution,” and 68 percent think there is “justification for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Obama at this time.” Even when given a number of options including “President Obama has abused his powers as president which rise to the level of impeachable offenses under the Constitution, but he should not be impeached,” 63 percent still said he ought to be impeached. A CNN poll found a smaller number of Republicans saying Obama should be impeached, but still a majority of 57 percent.
So the idea that Boehner characterizes as a crazy Democratic slander is the majority position among Republican voters. And they didn’t get the idea from nowhere. They got it because the people they trust — Republican politicians and conservative media figures — have been telling them for years, but with particularly ferocity in the last few months, that Barack Obama is a lawless tyrant who is trampling on the Constitution. They’ve been hearing this not just from the Sean Hannitys and Steve Kings of the world, but from every Republican, up to and including the GOP congressional leadership, on a daily basis. Of course those Republican voters think he should be impeached. It’s absurd for people like Boehner to turn around and say, “Whoa now, who’s thinking of impeachment? That’s just Democrats saying that.”
And consider the odd situation in which that leaves the President. As much as he has been under attack from Republicans over executive authority, he has a political incentive to bait Republicans into talking more about impeachment, which would both build pressure for it within the GOP and force them to deny it to the media. The best way for him to do so is to take more unilateral action on issues like immigration. That would incense Republicans, who would then rush to the cameras to decry his lawlessness, which would lead journalists to ask them whether they’re going to impeach him, which would lead them to tie themselves in knots denying it. Obama would get both the policy results he wants and the political benefit of making his opponents look like they’re about to drag the country into a repeat of the farce of 1998.
So yes, the talk of impeachment is in part a plot by the White House. But they’re only exploiting the pressure that exists within the GOP — pressure that John Boehner and the rest of the party leadership helped create. And if you think you’ve seen Republicans squirming uncomfortably over the question up until now, just you wait.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 29, 2014
“Marco Rubio’s Unique Take On History”: Way, Way, Way Back To The Future
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) generated quite a few headlines in his interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep this week, but not necessarily for the right reasons.
The story that got tongues wagging inside the Beltway was hard to miss: the conservative senator dismissed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s presidential future, arguing the nation is at a “generational, transformational crossroads,” and Clinton is “a 20th century candidate.”
Maybe it’s just me, but hearing a far-right lawmaker who opposes marriage equality, supports limits on contraception access, opposes reproductive rights, balks at ENDA, and fails to believe in climate science turn around and present himself as a forward-thinking leader for the future is a bit much. As Barbara Morrill joked, Rubio’s “the guy for a generational, transformational change. Assuming you’re talking about a transformation back to the 19th century.”
But just as interesting were the senator’s comments about comprehensive immigration reform, which Rubio co-sponsored in the Senate, which passed a bill fairly easily last year.
“I’ve been through this now, I was involved in the effort. I warned during that effort that I didn’t think it did enough on this first element, the [border] security front. I was proven, unfortunately, right by the fact that it didn’t move in the House.”
As the senator probably knows, this assessment doesn’t line up especially well with what’s actually transpired.
As Rubio now sees it, immigration reform died because the Senate bill – which is to say, Rubio’s bill – came up short on border security. We know this is wrong. To shore up GOP support in the upper chamber, the bill’s bipartisan sponsors agreed to a “border surge” that would nearly double the “current border patrol force to 40,000 agents from 21,000, as well as for the completion of 700 miles of fence on the nation’s southern border.”
It took border security so seriously that some reform proponents wavered, fearing it went too far in militarizing the border. One GOP senator conceded at the time that the legislation went so far on the security front that it was “almost overkill.”
Rubio now says he was right all along, warning senators that the bill wasn’t tough enough. But that’s plainly silly. Indeed, as Simon Maloy discovered, Rubio actually praised his bill’s security provisions at the time, boasting that it “mandates the most ambitious border and interior security measures in our nation’s history.”
So why did the House Republicans kill it anyway? Because the comprehensive solution required them to compromise, accepting a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the United States. House GOP lawmakers refused to strike a deal – hell, they refused to even go to the negotiating table – so the legislation died, again.
The related question is, why would Rubio make such obviously untrue claims now? The answer, I suspect, is that the Florida Republican took a sharp hit from his party’s far-right base for supporting immigration reform, and as Rubio looks ahead to the 2016 race, the senator needs a way to distance himself from his own legislative handiwork.
This, apparently, is the argument he’s come up with. If you’re thinking the talking points aren’t going to persuade anyone, you’re not alone.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 23, 2014
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